Reading Initiative

Mt. Abe Reading Initiative

Primary Reading Strategies

1. Imagine: Visualizing and creating mental images of characters, events, and/or ideas of what you read.
2. Make Connections: Making connections and relationships between what you read to personal experiences, previous knowledge, or other texts/readings.
3. Analyze Text Structures: Identifying and using key elements of textbooks and readings to gain meaning (table of contents, boldface, subheadings, etc...)
4. Recognize Words and Understand Sentences: Sounding out words and using words to get the meaning of words from the text.
5. Explore Inferences: Making predictions about what is going to happen based on story events. Identifying cause and effect situations, "Reading between the lines."
6. Ask Questions: Creating a dialog in your mind with the text that you are reading. Asking questions while reading to clarify meaning or extend understanding.
7. Determine Important Ideas and Themes: Identifying the big ideas of what you are reading, finding the "big picture" from text details (main idea, author's "purpose", thesis statement, etc...)
8. Evaluate, Summarize, Synthesize: Providing short statements that capture main ideas and related details. Assessing the quality of the text to show how much you understood.
9. Read and Adjust Approaches to the Text: Using fix-up strategies when meaning breaks down. Taking notes, underlining, rereading, and reading aloud to gain meaning from the text.